Spaces Of Connection

PORTS OF THE ANCIENT INDIAN OCEAN Edited by Marie-Francoise Boussac
Primus Books, New Delhi, Year 2017, pp. 559, Rs. 2195.00

VOLUME XLI NUMBER 5 May 2017

The last three years have seen an outpouring of works on
ports, Rila Mukherjee ed. Vanguards of Globalization: Port-Cities from the
Classical to the Modern, Sara Keller and Michael Pearson eds. Port Towns of
Gujarat and Marie-Francoise Boussac,
Jean-Francois Salles, Jean-Baptiste Yon eds. Ports of the Ancient Indian Ocean.
Incidentally all three are Primus publications.
The book under review, a compendium of twenty-four essays
organized under four sections—From the Red Sea to India, Through Arabia and the
Persian Gulf; Ancient Ports and Maritime Contacts of India; Related Areas:
Sri-Lanka, South-East Asia; French Archives, furnishing fascinating primary
source material—is an outcome of a colloquium. It is evident from the
subsections that the essays focus on material originating from the
Red Sea to India, through Arabia and the Persian Gulf, looking
at not only ancient Indian ports but going beyond to Sri Lanka and Southeast
Asia. For people interested in maritime society, there is a need to know not
only the pelagic but also the coast as Michael Pearson argues that a
distinctive maritime society can be found not on the deep sea but in the jewels
of the littoral, the port cities. Thus this volume on ports will be very
attractive to maritime historians.
The first section has nine essays dealing with ports and
sites. Three of the initial essays deal with the Egyptian ports on the Red Sea.
The first essay by Pierre Tallet introduces us to three port sites of Mersa
Gawasis near Safaga, Ayn Soukhna, on the northern part of the Suez Gulf and
Wadi el-Jarf to the south of Zafarana. These ports flourished during the
Pharaonic era. Extremely significant is the series of inscriptions from Ayn
Soukhna dating to the Middle Kingdom (2000–1800 BCE) which refer to a ‘mining land’
and mention turquoise which is one of its most important resources. The site
was used as a temporary harbour for expeditions to the mines in the Sinai
Peninsula. Excavations at Wadi el-Jarf point to the fact that a network of
strategic installations (surveillance installations) on both sides of the Gulf
of Suez was a practice to control the Red Sea coast and the access to the
resources of Sinai. This speaks for the extensive logistical organization of
seafaring expeditions. The second essay by Cheryl Ward and Chiara Zazzaro is an
archaeological find of dismantling of ships at Gawasis which were built at the
royal shipyards in ...